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Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Christmas Eve

The Possum Family would like to wish each and every one of you a joyous solstice, merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Season's Greetings. Thank you for reading and making this blog so worthwhile. Thank you for contributing and allowing me to share my family with you.

The following slide show shows some of our Christmas Eve traditions. PDaddy's family celebrates on Christmas Eve, so we do all of his family's gifts on 12/24. Then, the kids bunk down in the living room, together, to sleep. They've done this for eleven years and it's one of the sights I look forward to every year...and it's probably the sight that I will miss most when they grow up and move on to their own families. *brag alert* They are so beautiful. I love the love they have for each other. So...welcome to our Christmas Eve. Enjoy!

Lovely children--I am envious. I was too ill to have any, many of the descendents who live or lived near Mountain Meadows have died or are ill. Isotopic Radiation is bad for living things.

So I never had any kids, but as an oldest child, i never lacked for parental love-mine for my brats--or the responsibilties of co-parenting.

I suspect Atheism to be a religion,and think it ought to be handled as all others, including the separation of Church and State--it's Constitutional Protection stems from this premise.

Religion creates a family bond, or in mixed families, families, bonds.

Children love religion for this reason, but if parents try to control their childrens' late adolescent or adult beleifs, for methis crosses the line. Ditto withthe rejection or exclution of family or extended family members on the basis of religion.

I am Mormon. I took Philosophy at BYU, and whatever you are, causation cannot be proven--it cannot even be prove that the hammer striking the nail drives it into the wood. All we have is a sequence of events linked together by paradigms-systems of beleif or religion, including Atheism, are ways of linking phenomena. We cannot prove that a Deity existed.I do love mythology, and the Sacred Story of Mormonism, which for me, is both religion and ethnicity--by one quarter.

I was a deeply religious child. My father was a Battle Fatigue victimand my Faith comforted me--myFaith in a love greater than any I could find at home or in the World.

The Eastern concept of devotee/deciple, seems very sensible to me. I am a devotee. Described as Love and Light, I can feel the Divine within me.

I don't feel or believe in the George Bush God of payback or vegence and neither did my ancestors. I think Brigham Youngand the bodyguards he inherited from Joseph Smith had a plan to seperate the Misouri Wildcats and any others involved in the 40 bullet assasination of Joseph Smithby keeping them on the Spanish Trail until the Boggs turnoff--so the nitro and glicerain would be kept apart and no innocent blood would be shed--they were larglylight skinned indians from the five nations or part indian.

The plan went awry partly because the Fancher did not understand the wartime currency system and how to procure provisions. Threats, arrogance and bullying were their downfall, but all hopedthat no innocent person would be killed or hurt.

On the non-Mormon side my Grandfather was reared by kindly nuns. Since it was allowable, it was cruel of my parents not to allow him to baptise me a Catholic.

My Grandmother's Grandparentstraveled the West with a ProtestantEvangelical as singing master andcanary. They may have been lynched--in those days Saint Patty's Day was one big brawl. NoOrangeman ever belted it out likemy Grandfalther, who was alsoa drummer.

It is likely that they were lynched, in the broader sense, and my Grandfather was thrown clear of the wagon as it flipped.

He was given to the Priest who could not find a protestant to take him, so the puddlers in the ironfoundries too him an dressed himin Orange--a baptised Orangeman.

This alowed her to leave her battering German Lutheran, leaving her preteen boys betwixt and between. She was in Salt Lake in 1918 and a Polygamous family took her in and nursed her through.

That was when she began to feelherself Mormon, but to marry myGrandfather she went back to Catholisism, into which she had been baptised. They decided my father could choose a religion when he was older--he was 16 or seventen when he was baptised Mormon and his mother went with him.

We know now how disturbed war and genocide make people andI cannot blame my ancestors for what they did. My Granparents did feel that it was wrong to cover upthe History of the period permanently.

My grandfather, in the seventies,began to talk about the massacre to his agemates and none wouldadmit that it happened, that John D. Lee's mill ever existed. This wasseeply disturbing to him.

He had FMS so my more robust Grandmother dug out the basement while my grandfather maked where the shovelfulls weretaken from and where every objector soil sample was taken from on big graphpaper sheets.

In a way, this is all his fault--the bruhaha, the simplistic accountsof the massacre and it's times which I was reared to see in its complexity. Religious fanaticism was not very greatly involved.

As a secular person you may know of the 250,000 California Indians who were masacred between the Goldrush an end of the Century.The threats made by a Missouri Mob of Bushwhackers--their threatened return with an Armyof militias up the Southern Route from California was the immediate cause of the massacre.

We regret those who died and feelcompassion for those who still cannot comprehend how it could have happend, both progenitors, perpetrators and victims.

The then very old men who did this thing came to the millwhere my Greatgrandfather was miller and passed out bran and germ to the Piedes, were still trying to understand as the last of them died. My grandfather was a boy and easedropped whenever he could.

He and his friend William Palmerwere involved in Powell's geographic and anthropoligal studies of the West--he describedBryce Canyon and Cedar Breaks to them. They stayed at his tourist cabins, which he built for early motorists.

Juanita Books began to collect material from men who were there.

This was also when Maurine Whipple collected her material, staying a weekend with my grandparents and infant mother.

A long post, but I hope you will not consider it a diatribe. Anyonewho is troubled by this corner of history can visit me at www.mountainmeadowswiki.com.

An anonymous friend from the Hauge posted an article on Sherbeniza there. Anoymous posts are not all unhelfull.